The River Prophet.

by Raymond S. Spears.

CHAPTER I

Elijah Rasba lived alone in a log cabin on Temple Run. He was a long, lank, blue-eyed young man, with curly brown hair and a pale, almost livid complexion. His eye-brows were heavy and dark brown, and the blue steel of his gaze was fixed unwaveringly upon any object that it distinguished.

Two generations before, Old Abe Rasba had built a church on a little brook, a tributary of Jackson River, away up in the mountains. The church was laid up of flat stones, gathered in fields, from ledges of rock and up the wooded mountain side. It was large enough to hold all the people for miles around, and the roof was supported by ma.s.sive hewn timbers, and some few attempts had been made to decorate the structure.

Old Abe had called his church "The Temple," had preached from a big hollow oak stump, and laid down the Law of the Bible, which he had memorized by heart, and expounded from experience. Elijah Rasba, grandson of Old Abe, thus came honestly by reverence and religion, but the strange glory which had surrounded the old Temple had departed from the ruin, and of all the congregation, only Elijah remained.

Land-slips had ruined a score of farms cleared on too-steep hills; lightning had destroyed the overshot grist mill, and the two big stones had been cracked in the hot flames; a feud had opened graves before the allotted time of the victims. It seemed to Elijah, sitting there in his cabin, as though d.a.m.nation had visited the faithful, and that death was the reward of belief.

The ruins of the old Temple stood melancholy where the heavy stone wall, built by a man who believed in broad, firm foundations, had split an avalanche, but without avail, for the walls had given way and let the roof beams drop in. No less certain had been the fate of the congregation; they, too, were scattered or dead. There remained but one dwelling in the little valley, with a lone occupant, who was wrestling with his soul, trying to understand, for he knew in his heart that he must read the truth and discover the meaning of all this trouble, privation, disaster, and death.

He was quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle, and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and bra.s.s wire for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from its den.

An Almanac, a Bible, and a "Resources of Tennessee" comprised the library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder, about a hundred miles, perhaps--anyhow, from New York. The "Resources of Tennessee" had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, an inheritance.

It was a very small article, apparently, to create all the disturbances that seemed to have followed its interpretations there on Temple Run.

Elijah would hold it out at arms length and stare at it with those sharp eyes of his, wondering in his soul how it could be that the fate of nations, the future of humanity, the very salvation of every soul rested within the compa.s.s of that leather-covered, gilt-edged parcel of thin paper which weighed rather less than half as much as a box of cartridges.

Elijah did not spare himself in the least. He toiled at whatever task appeared for him to do. As he required for his own wants fifty bushels of corn for a year, he planted enough to shuck a hundred bushels. Once, in the fervour of the hope that he was called upon to raise corn for humanity, he raised five hundred bushels, only to give it all away to poor white trash who had not raised enough for themselves.

Again he felt the call to preach, and he went forth with all the eagerness of a man who had at last discovered his life's calling. He went on foot, through storms, over mountains, and into a hundred schoolhouses and churches, showing his little leather-skinned Bible and warning sinners to repent, Christians to keep faith, and Baal to lower his loathly head.

He had returned from his five months' pilgrimage with the feeling that his utmost efforts had been futile, and that for all his good will, it had not been vouchsafed him to leave behind one thought in fertile soil.

The matter had been brought home to him by an incident of the last meeting he had addressed, over on Clinch.

In the Painted Church he had volunteered a sermon, and no sermons had been preached there in years. Feuds, inextricably tangled, had involved five different families, and members of all those families were in the church, answering to his challenge.

They sat there with rifles or shotguns between their knees, with their pistols on their hips, and eternal vigilance in their eyes. While listening to his sermon they kept their gaze fastened upon one another, lest an unwary moment bring upon them the alert shot of an enemy.

As he had stood there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as though the final burden had been heaped upon him, and that he must break under the weight on his mind.

"What can I say to you all?" he burst out with sudden pa.s.sion. "Theh yo'

set with guns in yo' hands an' murder in yo' souls--to listen to the word of G.o.d! How do yo' expect the Prince of Peace to come to yo' if yo'

set there thataway?"

His indignation rose as he saw them, and his scorn unbridled his tongue, so that in a few minutes the congregation watched one another less, the preacher more, and all settled back, to listen and blink under his accusations and his declarations. It really seemed, for the time, as though he had caught and engaged their attention. But when the sermon ended and he had taken his departure, before he was a hundred yards down the road he heard loud words, angry shouts, and then the scream of a woman.

The next instant there came a salvo of gun and pistol shots and in all directions up and down the cross-roads people fled on horseback. Three men had been killed, five wounded and a dozen become fugitives from justice at the end of the church service.

Elijah Rasba fled homeward, his will and hopes broken, and sank dejectedly into a slough of despondency. All his good intentions, all the inspiration of his endeavour, his very spiritual exaltation had terminated in a tragedy, as inexplicable as it was depressing.

His conscience would neither let him rest nor work. He looked at his Bible, inside and out, the very fibres of his brain struggling by reason, by effort, by main strength, to discover what his duty was. No answer soothed his waking hours or gave him rest from his dreams. On him rested a kind of superst.i.tious scorn and fear, and he began to believe the whisperings of his neighbours which reached his ears. They said:

"He's possessed!"

To his own freighted mind the statement seemed to be true. He did not know what new sin he had committed, nor could he look back on long years of his youth and young manhood and discover any sin which he had not already expiated, over and over again. He had obeyed the scriptural injunctions to the best of his knowledge, and the reward was this daily and nightly torment, the scorn of his fellows, and the questioning of his own soul.

Worst of all, constructively, he had given feud fighters the chance to do murder upon one another. Under the guise of preaching for them for the good of their souls, he had enabled them to meet in antagonism, watch in wrath, and kill without mercy. Too late he realized that he should have foreseen the tragedy, and that he should have provided against it by going first to each faction, preaching to each family, and then, when he had brought them to their knees, united them in the common cause of religion.

"On me is Thy wrath!" he cried out in the anguish of his soul. "Give thy tortured slave something good to do, ere I go down!"

There was no reply, immediate or audible; he was near the limits of his endurance; he drew his arm back to throw the Bible into the flames of his fireplace, but that he could not do. He tossed it upon the shelf, drew his hat down upon his ears and at the approach of night started over the ridges to the Kalbean stillhouse.

He stalked down a ridge into that split-board shack of infamy. He found five or six men in the hot, sour-smelling place. They started to their feet when they saw the mountain preacher among them.

"Gimme some!" he told Old Kalbean. "I'm a fool! I'm d.a.m.ned. I'll go with the rest of ye to h.e.l.l! Gimme some!"

"Wha--What?" Old Kalbean choked with horror. "Yo' gwine to drink, Parson?"

"Suttinly!" Rasba cried. "Hit ain' no ust for me to preach! I preach, an' the congregation murders one anotheh! Ef I don't preach, I cayn't live peaceable! They say hit makes a man happy--I ain' be'n happy, not in ten, not in twenty yeahs!"

He caught up the jug that rested on the floor, threw the tin cup to one side, up-ended the receptacle, and the moonshiner and his customers stared.

"Theh!" Rasba grunted, when he had to take the jug down for breath. He reached into his pocket, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to the amazed mountain man.

"Theh!" he repeated, defiantly. "I've sh.o.r.e gone to h.e.l.l, now, an' I don't give a d.a.m.n, nuther. S'long, boys! D'rectly, yo'l heah me jes' a whoopin', yas suh! Jes' a whoopin'!"

He left them abruptly and he went up into the darkness of the laurels.

They heard him crashing away into the night. When he was gone the men looked at one another:

"Yo' 'low he'll bring the revenuers?" one asked, nervously.

"Bring nothin'!" another grinned. "No man eveh lived could drink fifteen big gulps, like he done, an' git furder'n a stuck hog, no, suh!"

They listened for the promised whoops; they strained their ears for the cries of jubilation; but none came.

"Co'rse," the stiller explained, as though an explanation were needed, "Parson Rasba ain' used to hit; he could carry more, an' hit'll take him longer to get lit up. But, law me, when hit begins to act! That's three yeah old, boys, mild, but no mewl yo' eveh saw has the kick that's got, apple an' berry cider, stilled down from the ferment!"

CHAPTER II

Virtue had not been rewarded. This much was clear and plain to the consciousness of Nelia Carline. Looking at herself in the gla.s.s disclosed no special reason why she should be unhappy and suffering. She was a pretty girl; everybody said that, and envy said she was too pretty. It seemed that poor folks had no right to be good-looking, anyhow.

If poor folks weren't good-looking, then wealthy young men, with nothing better to do, wouldn't go around looking among poor folks for pretty girls. Augustus Carline had, apparently, done that. Carline had a fortune that had been increased during three generations, and now he didn't have to work. That was bad in Gage, Illinois. It had never done any one any good, that kind of living. One of the fruits of the matter was when Nelia Crele's pretty face attracted his attention. She lived in a shack up the Bottoms near St. Genevieve, and he tried to flirt with her, but she wouldn't flirt.

In some surprise, startled by his rebuff, he withdrew from the scene with a memory that would not forget. The scene was a wheat field near the Turkey bayou, where he was hunting wild ducks with a shotgun. She had been gathering forty pounds of hickory nuts to eke out a meagre food supply.

Poor she might be; ill clad was her strong young figure; her face showed the strain of years of effort; her eyes had the fire of experience in suffering; and she stood, a supple girl of heightened beauty while the hunter, sure of his welcome, walked up to her, and, as both her hands held the awkward bushel basket, ventured to tickle her under the chin.

She dropped the basket and before it reached the ground she caught the rash youth broad-handed from cheek to back of the ear, and he stumbled over a pile of wheat sheaves and fell headlong. As he had dropped his shotgun, she picked it up and with her thumb on the safety, her finger on the trigger, and her left hand on the breech, showed him how a $125 shotgun looks in the hands of one who could and would use it on any further provocation.